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How To Make Quality Homemade Wine (part 2)
How To Make Quality Homemade Wine (part 2)

Video: How To Make Quality Homemade Wine (part 2)

Video: How To Make Quality Homemade Wine (part 2)
Video: HOMEMADE WINE pt 2 - THE WINE EXPERIENCE 2024, March
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You won't get drunk with your wine

Semi-sweet wine

Semi-sweet wine is characterized by less alcohol, sugar and less extract than dessert wine. It is a light, pleasant drink. For its preparation, fruits and berries with a rough taste (mountain ash) or very high acidity (Japanese quince, cranberry) are not recommended.

Squeezed, as for dessert wine, the juice is diluted with water and sugar in the following proportions.

Table 1. The amount of sugar and water added to 1 liter of pure juice in grams

Culture Before fermentation Sugar during fermentation
Water Sugar Day 4 7 day
Apple tree 100 150 thirty thirty
Ranetka and Chinese 680 250 40 40
Gooseberry 1500 400 100 100
Raspberries 980 350 50 50
Strawberry 540 250 50 50
Black currant 2260 600 100 100
Red currant (white) 1500 400 110 110
Cherry Vladimirskaya 460 200 40 40
Cherry Lyubskaya, etc. 780 300 40 40

"Water" in the table is the total value with water added to the pulp before and after pressing.

All processes of making semi-sweet wine - fermentation, topping up, removal from the sediment - are carried out in the same way as for dessert wine.

The finished fermented dry wine material is processed in two ways to give it the desired sugar content.

First way. Sugar is added to the finished clarified wine material removed from the sediment: 50 g per 1 liter of wine. Semi-sweet wine is fragile, easily ferments, therefore, to give it strength, the wine is pasteurized. I want to acquaint the reader with two types of homemade wine - dry apple wine, which can be easily turned into semisweet, depending on the wishes of the consumer, and berry tincture.

Ready semi-sweet wine is bottled up to half the height of the neck and sealed. Then they are placed in a saucepan on a stand. The water in the pot should be at the level of the wine. The water is heated to 75 ° C and maintained at this temperature for 30 minutes. Then the bottles are removed, cooled and the tightness of the closure is checked.

Second way. The finished wine material is bottled and sealed without sweetening. Cork plugs are filled with resin, sealing wax and stored until use. Before use, sugar dissolved in the same wine material in the amount of 800 g per 1 liter is added to the finished wine material, and 0.5 cups of the prepared syrup per 1 liter of wine is poured into a bottle of wine. This method is easier to do.

A very tasty wine is obtained if, instead of sugar, honey is added to it from 50 to 100 g per 1 liter of wine before use. Apple and gooseberry wines especially benefit from this additive.

It is better to store dessert and semi-sweet wines at temperatures below + 15 ° С, since at higher temperatures its taste deteriorates.

Dry wine

Table (dry) wine is a light, low-grade wine (not higher than 12 degrees), which does not contain sugar (fermented "dry"). A good dry wine should have a light varietal aroma, mild harmonious taste with pleasant acidity. Berries with a heavy, strong aroma are unsuitable for making table wines. For example, raspberries are an excellent raw material for making dessert wines, but they are not suitable for canteens. The same applies to strawberries, mountain ash and those gooseberry varieties that have a strong specific aroma.

The best table wines are made from grapes, apples, cherries, white currants and some gooseberry varieties. Table wines can be made from red currants, but they are somewhat worse in quality. A good table wine is made from rhubarb.

When making table wine, many processes are the same as for dessert wine. For example, picking, washing, crushing fruits, heating the pulp, pressing, clarifying are also table wine. Pulp fermentation is not recommended. It is better to prepare the pulp for pressing the pulp of cultures that are difficult to yield juice according to the second method (heating the pulp). It should be borne in mind that apple wines during fermentation lose up to 2 g of acid per 1 liter. Gooseberry wines lose less acid, while currant wines do not lose acidity. This is important, as low-grade wines with low acidity ferment poorly and spoil easily.

In the following ratios of water and sugar for making table wines, it can be seen that apple juice is not diluted with water, but only sugar is added.

Table 2. The amount of water and sugar added to 1 liter of pure juice

Culture Water Sugar
Apple tree - 90
Gooseberry 1600 420
Currant (white, red) 1970 520
Rhubarb 800 350
Cherry 800 300

The "water" of the table is the total value together with the water added to the pulp before and during pressing.

All the required amount of sugar is dissolved in water and added to the juice before fermentation begins. For apples, sugar is dissolved in juice. Juice with water and sugar is poured into a fermentation container for 3/4 of the volume, 2% yeast sourdough and 0.3 g of ammonium chloride per 1 liter of the mixture are immediately added there. It is very important that the leaven is in a vigorous fermentation stage. After adding the starter culture, the dishes with juice are closed with a cotton plug and isolated from direct sunlight. On the second or third day, the juice begins to ferment violently.

Fermentation is the most important process in the production of table wines. The quality of the resulting wine largely depends on the correctness of the fermentation. The temperature of the wort must be brought to + 18 … + 20 ° C and during the entire fermentation period, make sure that it does not rise, since a higher temperature promotes the development of vinegar and lactic bacteria.

Vigorous fermentation usually lasts 4–5 days, after which the cotton tongue is replaced with a water seal, and immediately begins topping up the dishes in which the wine ferments. You need to top up with wine of the same variety every 2-3 days in such a way that the dishes are completely topped up with wine in 10 days. When refilling, the water seal is removed and then reinstalled in place. In the future, the wine is topped up as needed, but at least once a week. The wine for topping must be healthy.

After vigorous fermentation, the wine is quietly fermented for 1-1.5 months, during which sugar is completely converted into alcohol and carbon dioxide. Sugar should not taste, and the wine gradually lightens with precipitation. By the end of quiet fermentation, the wine must be removed from the sediment so that there is no unpleasant yeast aftertaste in it.

Then the wine is poured into bottles to half the neck, tightly sealed and stored at a temperature of +2 to + 15 ° C. At higher temperatures, it quickly deteriorates.

Diseases of dry and semi-sweet wines are caused by aerobic microorganisms: wine mold and vinegar bacteria. These microorganisms and their secretions are not harmful to humans, but, developing in wine, they can completely spoil it. Both wine mold and vinegar bacteria can develop with abundant access of air and temperatures above + 15 ° C in wines with a strength below 15 degrees. Dessert wines are not affected by these diseases. Wine mold develops in incompletely filled containers in the form of a grayish folded film (blooming). It breaks down the acids in wine to carbon dioxide and water. Vinegar bacteria under the same conditions can turn wine into vinegar. To avoid this, all technological conditions must be strictly observed. I had to deal with both types of home wine disease when I was not yet familiar with all the rules of home wine making.

Homemade wines and liqueurs
Homemade wines and liqueurs

I would like to acquaint the reader with two types of homemade wine - dry apple wine, which can easily be turned into semi-sweet, depending on the wishes of the consumer, and berry tincture.

For the past several years, I have confidently made dry apple wine using grape sourdough, both white and black, appreciating its convenience and effectiveness.

The process of obtaining is as follows. Unwashed grapes bought on the market are kneaded, mixed with a small amount of sugar to ferment the sourdough and placed in a glass jar with a lid for 2-3 days in a warm room (in the kitchen table) (0.5-0.8 kg per 10 liters of juice). The juice is squeezed out of the washed apples using an electric juicer (I use a Sadovaya juicer made in Belarus). Sick apples are not suitable for this purpose. Moreover, it was necessary to prepare wine from summer varieties of apples, such as Papirovka, Grushovka and Moskovskaya grushovka, and from apples of later varieties - Ranet Chernenko, Telisaare and others. Were in work not only pure varieties, but also their mixtures. It is known that for a higher yield of juice, it is desirable to use more juicy apples.

After pressing, the apple juice was freed from the foam formed during the extraction and from the sediment (the pulp of the apples used). For this, the juice was settled in a separate container for several hours. After settling, the clear juice without adding water (as described in the section "Dry Wine") is placed in a glass or plastic bottle for drinking water 3/4 of the volume of the container. The free volume of the bottle is necessary for foam during the period of vigorous fermentation. Simultaneously with the juice, the sourdough is placed in the bottle, and the vessel is immediately placed under a water seal, since the process of violent fermentation using grapes begins on the very first day in the kitchen. It should be noted that the temperature in the room was within + 22 … + 25 ° С.

After two weeks of vigorous fermentation, the wine material was freed from foam and sediment by siphoning, after which a quiet fermentation of the wort began. It should be noted that the juice from sweet apples does not need the addition of sugar for fermentation, and for more acidic varieties, you have to add 90-130 g of sugar per 1 liter of juice. The wine material was added after each removal of the produced apple wine from the sediment.

After a month and a half of quiet fermentation with at least two removal of the wine from the sediment, it was poured into bottles with both screw and cork corks. The bottles were placed in a loggia cabinet, the temperature in which was below + 15 ° С. The wine obtained by the described method was transparent, completely dry in taste. But, as a rule, before using it, sugar was added to the wine to taste by dissolving in a small amount of wine cast for this purpose.

The described method of obtaining dry apple wine gives a good result and is free from calculating the amount of wine yeast and salt for their nutrition, although I always have yeast. In the absence of yeast and grapes, you can use unwashed raisins, which starts the fermentation process with a cotton plug on the bottle.

Now I'll tell you about the tincture of black and red currant berriesand mixtures thereof in any proportion. Wash berries removed from the bush, dry and place in a clean jar of any capacity. I always use three-liter jars, since there are a lot of berries, and I have not made jam and vitamin preparation from them for a long time. Berries are poured right under the throat or to the top - this will determine the amount of vodka poured into the can. The vodka should cover the berries, after which the jar is tightly closed with a plastic lid and stands on the sunny window for at least one month. At the end of the exposure, the extract (extract) is poured into another container and adjusted for strength by adding water and sugar content. From a three-liter jar of berries, approximately 1.5 liters of tincture is obtained, brought to a condition in accordance with the taste of the winemaker. In my opinion, it turns out a good light wine, close to semi-sweet in type.

Black currant tincture has a rich taste, if desired, it can be softened by adding ready-made red currant tincture or by preparing a mixture of berries at the first stage of production. Any proportions.

Redcurrant liqueur is much softer and more pleasant than blackcurrant wine or blend. Obviously, this is all a matter of the manufacturer's taste. The resulting wine is bottled, well sealed and stored under any temperature conditions. This wine matures in bottles and changes its taste for the better. The bottle stage of any wine is the maturation stage.

Lyudmila Rybkina, wine grower

Photo by the author

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